Despite the fact that most of the opera sounds like a jaunty triumphal march — which is somewhat disconcerting when the performers on stage are singing lines like “Death to the Montagues!” and “Prepare yourself for a massacre!” — DiDonato’s fierceness and force of will makes the music and text seem like they are perfectly in alignment.

Dressed in costume designer Christian Lacroix’s modish, Victorian-street-urchin-meets-biker-boy garb, the performer oozes virile masculinity. I wouldn’t be surprised if nearly every woman and man in the house, regardless of their sexual orientation, secretly fantasizes about playing Juliet to DiDonato’s Romeo.

The flexibility and fluidity of the performer’s voice is such that she can make even the most feminine-sounding run at the very top of her range sound testosterone-laced in this production. At times, DiDonato’s vocal power makes her come across as sounding more like a countertenor (or perhaps even a castrato, if I may hazard a guess as what this kind of singer sounded like) than a mezzo soprano. And there’s also a softness at the edges of her voice which makes the character seem entirely vulnerable.

There are many things to recommend this production, including Lacroix’s costumes, the San Francisco Opera orchestra’s emotional yet punctilious playing, Guido Levi’s mood-contorting lights and Vincent Lemaire’s expressionistic set design, not to mention a stellar cast, which besides DiDonato, features Nicole Cabell as Juliet, Saimir Pirgu as Tybalt, Eric Owens as Juliet’s father, Capulet, and Ao Li and Lorenzo, the Capulets’ physician.

Comments

Perhaps we could think of Joyce DiDonato as a master of transformation, gendered or otherwise. I like the fact that she was born as Joyce Flaherty in Prairie Village, Kansas to a large Irish-American family and studied at Wichita State University. Most prosaic. She still uses the family name of her first husband. Opera is always much more earthy and populist than we want to admit – hence the oozing sexuality of husky Kansas girls – though I’m not sure where the cross-dressing fits in. Or wait, this was in San Francisco…

Chloe Veltman

is the Arts Editor at Colorado Public Radio (cpr.org), where she is launching and leading the statewide media organization's first ever multimedia culture bureau. A former John S. Knight Journalism Fellow (2011-2012) and Humanities Center Fellow (2012-2013) at Stanford University, Chloe has contributed reporting and criticism to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, BBC Classical Music Magazine, American Theatre Magazine, WQXR and many other media outlets. Chloe is also the host and executive producer of VoiceBox, a weekly public radio and podcast series all about the art of the human voice (www.voicebox-media.org). She is currently at work on a study about singing culture in the US. Check out Chloe's website at www.chloeveltman.com and connect with her on Twitter via @chloeveltman. [Read More …]

lies like truth

These days, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fantasy. As Alan Bennett's doollally headmaster in Forty Years On astutely puts it, "What is truth and what is fable? Where is Ruth and where is Mabel?" It is one of the main tasks of this blog to celebrate the confusion through thinking about art and perhaps, on occasion, attempt to unpick the knot. [Read More...]